It's not about gaming the metric, it's just that the metric doesn't mean very much in the first place. Running a coverage tool during tests won't show you edge cases you forgot to handle in the code under test, it will show you code that's not tested at all. That can sometimes be useful for pointing out blind spots, but you shouldn't derive any confidence in the tests from a high coverage score, even if the people who worked on the project had the best intentions.
Coverage tools could only measure quality of a test suite if you're assuming that either the code is perfect or that the existing tests cover (logically) everything about what they test. Without either of those guarantees, it doesn't tell you anything very meaningful, as you discovered.
